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‘Tinker, Tailor’ joins the December club
American viewers already frustrated about waiting two months longer than the Brits to lay eyes on Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — welcome to our world, guys — won’t be pleased by...
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VENICE: Follow the Lido — a festival preview
“Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site,...
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REVIEW: “The Ides of March” (***)
Venice Film Festival “I’m not a Christian. I’m not an atheist. I’m not a Muslim. I’m not Jewish. I believe in the American constitution,” intones a spiffily-suited and even fresher-faced-than-usual...
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REVIEW: “Carnage” (**1/2)
Venice Film Festival When the title of Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed 2006 play “God of Carnage” was given a haircut in its transition to the screen, it was hard to read what — if anything — the change...
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REVIEW: “W.E.” (*1/2)
Venice Film Festival There’s such a bounty of ripe absurdities in Madonna’s sophomore directorial effort “W.E.” — an over-the-spectacles glance at the supposedly for-the-ages romance of Wallis Simpson...
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REVIEW: “A Dangerous Method” (**1/2)
Venice Film Festival “Do you think they know we’re on our way, bringing them the plague?” So asks Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud of his younger colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), as the two...
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VENICE: ‘Alps’ and other drugs
The first few days of the Venice Film Festival were so jam-packed with the big-name premieres you’ve been most restless to hear about that, between thrashing out full-length individual reviews of those...
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REVIEW: “Shame” (***1/2)
Venice Film Festival If “Hunger,” artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s remarkable debut feature, was a study of a body strenuously denied its fundamental needs, his satisfyingly rigorous, explicit...
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‘Turin Horse’ among latest foreign Oscar entries
This news has been hanging around for a few days, but amid the Venice hubbub, I haven’t found a moment to post it until today — though we did address it briefly in Friday’s Oscar Talk. With less than a...
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VENICE: ‘Dark Horse,’‘Chicken With Plums,’‘Sal’
(Review of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” landing later this morning. Hang tight.) Todd Solondz has forged a loyal friendship with the Venice Film Festival across the second half of his career: all...
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REVIEW: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (***1/2)
Venice Film Festival An uncharacteristically dark Venetian downpour greeted this morning’s premiere screening of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and if some flashbulbs of lightning last night hadn’t...
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REVIEW: “Wuthering Heights” (***1/2)
Venice Film Festival British filmmaker Andrea Arnold would have been 16 years old when Kate Bush topped the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights,” a swirling art-rock ballad that stripped the Emily...
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Beatty, Bonham Carter among 2011 BAFTA LA honorees
I’ve never been precisely sure what BAFTA Los Angeles is, or what it is that they do — I do know that I’m wary of any group that is chaired by “So You Think You Can Dance” overlord Nigel Lythgoe, but...
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London Film Festival unveils Weisz-bookended lineup
I’m not going to spend too much time on the London Film Festival lineup, which was announced in all its glory this morning — partly because I’m still at Venice and am experiencing disturbing festival...
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VENICE: ‘Killer Joe,’‘The Exchange,’‘4:44: Last Day on Earth’
With two days to go until wrap-up, and a host of journalists having defected to Toronto, one can feel the air not-so-slowly hissing out of the Venice balloon. And while this certainly has its upsides —...
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‘Pina’ among latest entries in foreign Oscar race
I predicted on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that Wim Wenders’ 3D dance film “Pina” would be selected as Germany’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and that it could well be a...
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VENICE: ‘Texas Killing Fields,’‘Faust,’ competition stragglers
After a ten-day, 23-film Venice Competition that started slowly but respectably, hit a healthy stride midway through and began wheezing with exhaustion in its closing stages, things have finally ground...
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VENICE: What will win… and what should
This year’s Competition strand of the Venice Film comprised 23 films — a large-ish number by major festival standards, and yet it still feels remarkably thin. Admittedly, I’m viewing the field with a...
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VENICE: Delicious ‘Damsels’ breaks the Closing Night curse
“Oh, Christ, that means it’s going to be shit,” wailed a friend of mine, an ardent devotee of long-dormant American auteur Whit Stillman, when the director’s new film, “Damsels in Distress,” was...
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Venice awards make a stand
To judge from the press reaction to yesterday’s Venice Film Festival awards, you could be forgiven for thinking that Michael Fassbender won every single one of them, plus an extra certificate for full...
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